Preserved Emotional Modulation of Motor Response Time Despite Psychomotor Slowing in Young-Old Adults

ABSTRACT

Whereas aging affects cognitive and psychomotor processes negatively, the impact of aging on emotional processing is less clear. Using an “old–new” binary decision task, we ascertained the modulation of response latencies after presentation of neutral and emotional pictures in “young” (M = 27.1 years) and “young-old” adults with a mean age below 60 (M = 57.7 years). Stimuli varied on valence (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) and arousal (high and low) dimensions. Young-old adults had significantly longer reaction times. However, young and young-old adults showed the exact same pattern of response time modulation by emotional stimuli: Response latencies were longer for high-arousal than for low-arousal pictures and longer for negative than for positive or neutral stimuli. This result suggests that the specific effects of implicitly processed emotional valence and arousal information on behavioral response time are preserved in young-old adults despite significant age-related psychomotor decline.

KEYWORDS: :

• Aging
• emotional processing
• reaction time
• young-old adults

Notes

1 In order to examine the effects of arousal and valence separately, it was crucial to avoid confounding both emotion dimensions (arousal and valence) when selecting pictures for the present study. We therefore ensured that the mean valence values differed from one another when compared separately across high arousal pictures (positive: M = 3.56, SE = 0.15, neutral: M = 4.91, SE = 0.04, and negative M = 7.38, SE = 0.15; all p's < 0.001) and low arousal pictures (positive: M = 2.25, SE = 0.18, neutral: M = 5.08, SE = 0.06, and negative M = 7.05, SE = 0.12; all p's < 0.001). Further, the positive and negative picture selections were balanced with respect to their published arousal values (negative M = 5.05, SE = 0.14, and positive M = 5.12, SE 0.12; p = 0.676) and their arousal values differed from the neutral pictures (M = 3.00, SE 0.08; p's < 0.001).